The highly acclaimed Finnish death doomsters return with their most ambitious work to date. Produced once again by the TRIPTYKON and DARK FORTRESS guitarist V. Santura, KUOLEMANLAAKSO's sophomore album "Tulijoutsen" ("The Fire Swan") explores unconquered grounds of heaviness, and pushes the band into a new level of melancholy. The 50-minute magnum opus was inspired by the grandeur of the Finnish forests, serene eeriness of the lakes and early 1900s poetry and folklore. Thus it was only natural for the band to live the lyrics, so to speak, and isolate themselves in a secluded location in the middle of the woods, and capture the true essence of the songs on hard disk.
Review
With their sophomore effort, Tulijoutsen ("The Fire Swan," hence the album cover), Kuolemanlaakso go for an attempt at striking a balance between intense and relaxing. For more or less the first half of the album, the band plunge their listeners into a harsh atmosphere of extreme doom, with thick pulsating riffs and deep growls that, while perhaps not overly memorable, are certainly easy to fall back and groove out to. While delivered well, at some points this formula can feel a bit redundant, with the music coming across as a bit monotonous and as lacking a good degree of variety. Thankfully, however, this is not all there is to the formula that is Kuolemanlaakso, and the band manage to slightly redeem themselves in the album's second half. - Metal Storm 4/5
